President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and company have declared war on America with their far-left legislation and parliamentary procedural attacks — especially in the U.S. Senate. This invites conservatives to accelerate the midterm election debate, which tends to restore political control to the party out of power.
Whichever party holds the White House tends to lose the midterms. Recent election patterns have revealed another even more important trend: If the party in power overreaches in its policies, that party can expect an electoral rout in the midterm.
Such was the case in 1994 when Bill Clinton held the White House. After two years of tax hikes, and aggressively advancing socialized healthcare (HillaryCare), Democrats lost a whopping 54 House seats, and the House majority for the first time in over half a century. Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America worked spectacularly, delivering a Republican majority with a popular agenda, holding the line on government spending leading to budget surpluses by the end of the decade.
In 2010, after the first two years of Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House. Democrats had overreached with a severe leftward tilt on stimulus spending ($750 Billion — the largest two-year spending to that point) plus the new entitlement spending of ObamaCare. Republican Paul Ryan became the new House Speaker soon thereafter.
Even though Obama won reelection two years later against a hapless Mitt Romney, the 2014 midterms again recorded a Republican congressional wave, ousting long-time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid with new Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is still in office to this day.
How many seats will Republicans gain in 2022? Democrats currently hold a nine-seat majority in the House (222-213), one of the narrowest margins in American history. Flipping only five seats would gain a new Republican House majority. The Senate majority is zero, with a 50/50 split. Republicans would need to gain just one seat for a new Senate majority.
Considering the alarming leftward surge in the first 50 days of the Biden administration, Republicans will likely win both houses of Congress.
Total spending so far by Democrats is already approaching $2 trillion, with AOC and Bernie Sanders demanding even more energy job losses. Biden is already threatening the largest tax increase ever reversing the 2017 Trump’s tax cuts, plus a new carbon tax, a new “wealth” tax, and higher capital gains taxes, which never raised revenue before.
Biden’s folly at the southern border has already developed into a crisis, crying out for reform. His executive orders implementing this, plus economically stifling regulatory overreach, are certain to retard any real recovery from Biden’s lock-down lunacy.
Moreover, Democrat governors in the two largest blue states, California and New York, are now facing popular revolts. Governors Newsom and Cuomo are subject to headlines demanding recall, indictment, or forced resignation. Despite the flood of Washington money to cover for their malfeasance, they appear doomed to removal by 2022.
Voters in these two very blue states are revolting chiefly because these two governors abused their working class during the pandemic. The cure was worse than the disease. Similar trends are marking the new Biden administration. The electorate is paying attention.
Coupled with the growing concern over Biden’s mental health and competence for the job, many are wondering when the ruling elite will pull the 25th Amendment out for Joe and install radical leftist Kamala Harris in the presidency. While we wish Biden a long and healthy life, this appears to be a difference without a distinction.
Nonetheless, Democrats are forging ahead on the most radical policy prescriptions the nation has ever witnessed, portending even more radical political reversal in the midterms.
But history is not lost on congressional Democrats. HR 1, the massive election reform proposal, is their latest attempt to short-circuit the American system of checks and balances. By enshrining into federal law mail-in voting and loose registration rules nationwide, they are attempting to write a new history in the ’22 midterms, granting themselves permanent ruling status.
Republicans may come out of the next midterm with more than a solid congressional majority, but only if HR 1 and the remainder of the radical leftist Biden agenda is attacked relentlessly and perhaps even stalled by state and national Republicans. The prospect of newly elected Republican governors, joining popular Republican governors in competently run states like Florida and Texas, will also serve them well in recapturing the White House in 2024.
Lewis K. Uhler is founder and chairman of the National Tax Limitation Committee and the National Tax Limitation Foundation (NTLF). He was a contemporary and collaborator with Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman in California and across the country.
Peter J. Ferrara served as a member of the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush, and the Dunn Liberty Fellow in Economics at the King’s College in New York.
Joe Yocca is NTLF’s policy director. A long-time political and policy consultant, he served in the California State Senate as chief of staff to the Republican leadership for decades, and directed numerous statewide legislative and congressional campaigns throughout his career.
Fair and free elections needs to be on top of the Republican Agenda. Without getting the actual evidence on the table of how the last election was altered, even with some blatant fraud, and the Republican states instituting voter ID, same day voting, stopping mail in balloting, etc., our elections are lost forever. Then 2022 and 2024 become a moot point.